Work Text:
Do you have the time?
(It’s two twenty-seven. Past midnight.)
***
Please don’t sit up. His head is propped on a pillow.
Who am I?
Your name is Rolo Lamperouge. You have a 39.4 degrees fever and two broken bones. You live on the Ashford Academy campus and your brother loves you. You have fifteen years of an assassin’s track record and twelve skeletons in your closet.
(One of the above is a lie. Guess which one.)
He shives violently. The bedsheets are twisted like a snake around his ankle. Fog swallows him like a toad swallowing a marble. He scrambles for memories; he looks for broken skin and there are no more bruises over his body. He tries to count. None. Not a single one. Zilch. Nada. Zero.
***
Open your mouth, someone says. A scalding teaspoon beckons at his lips. It clinks at the gates of his teeth, trying to pry it open and reach the foul cave beneath it.
Swallow, someone says. Obey me. Swallow.
The voice is a fist jammed into the hollow of Rolo’s throat; he has no choice but to comply. Medicine—medicine or poison, its aftertaste faintly herbal like mint or toothpaste or licorice—slips down his throat like water spilling down the drain. The spoon sets his tongue on fire. His throat burns.
The tip of a needle slides into his upper arm and the pinprick of pain blooms in his mind like a tendril of milk diffused into tea.
(His throat is swollen. His arm is crawling all over with red ants.)
C. C. is holding his limp hand, rubbing circles into the space between his thumb and forefinger until it hurts—she makes no pretense of the fact that it is supposed to hurt. He rasps, a wounded sound rattling in his throat like dried maple leaves or loose teeth rattling in a cup, like the eerie, cavernous groan of a splash, and her face lights up if only for a moment. The laurel of her jade-green hair leaves haloes burning through Rolo’s brain. “That’s my name, Rolo. You’ve said my name.” She presses her cool fingers to his burning temples. He screams.
The temple in the sky collapses.
***
There were only ten of them in the beginning and Rolo was one of the first. He was a guinea pig waiting to be gutted if the experiment failed. If he dropped off the face of the earth, Time wouldn’t blink to notice the blip he left in the world’s creases.
He’d sat for hours with pins in his scalps, pins in his fingertips, pins beneath his skin and on the insides of his mouth. The machines all around him went blip, blip, blip. Once he managed to make everything go quiet, and it was the only time Rolo had ever seen V.V. smile. He’d stop time, over, over, and over, just so he could have silence. At his feet there are layers and layers of ground, each one more ancient than the last. If he sends his mind down there it will bruise on gnarled twigs and black stone and moss. It hurts, can’t do it again can’t can’t can’t—
(Do it again, V.V.’s voice hisses from all those years ago – needles in his scalp, thermometer under his tongue.)
Do it again, Lelouche’s voice whispers.
***
What is the time?
(The hands of your heart are stopped at four thirty-two, PM. My God, Rolo, you run just like clockwork.)
***
He sits in a white room and picks apart his skin. He tears shred after shred away from his toenails until they are ragged. The images sputter around him like a mosaic as the church disintegrates. Charles vi Britannia holding a handful of dirt, black feathers or oil-dark scales running over his shoulders. Marianne floats with her arms spread in a pool of bluish water, blue as her lips, plum blossoms floating on the darkened surface. C.C. sitting naked with a myriad of golden chains coiled around her marble-pale torso, like wearing a harness of snakes; Kozuki Kallen with shackles of flame around her wrists, lifting her upwards even as her hands fall off, like Christ’s, spluttering ash. Shinozaki Sayako wringing a bloodied apron dry in a basin with hands better known for wringing the life out of men’s lungs. Rivalz trying to smash an hourglass against his desk by knocking it over. Someone puts a thermometer under his swollen tongue and says, Fahrenheit 104°, somebody get him a glass of—
Shirley Fenette holds a cup of scalding tea in her hands even though the porcelain is chipped and bit by bit falling apart. It blisters across her soft, naked palms. The floor is bruised by her knees, pleasured, thundered in mockery of her prayer.
Blood clogs his throat. It thickens the linings of his lungs like a horrible sickness. Rolo vomits guilt.
***
There is a girl standing in the mirror when he stands before the sink. Her hair trickles down her bare shoulders like clouded honey oozing down the white, powdery Grecian pillars; she has gold-dappled eyelashes and the smallest birthmark on the left side of her shoulder. A small spot of troubled water mars the skin between her eyebrows.
Rolo raises his right hand, and the girl in the mirror raises her left. He drops it. The girl’s wrist falls, just as rapidly, sharp as a stone tumbling over the edge of a cliff—
We’re twins, she says.
My birthday’s on October 25th. How about yours?
Rolo shakes his head. If he opens his mouth, he might start crying.
You’re bleeding. Who did this to you?
My brother.
My brother wouldn’t have hurt you, she says, confused. She’s wearing a dress woven out of velvet and fine silk more beautiful than anything Rolo has ever owned, and it pools around her feet, eddying, a Charybdis of years and memory. My brother never hurts me.
He wouldn’t have hurt you, Rolo says. I’m not you.
Aren’t you? Nunnally vi Britannia asks him. She lifts her left hand and presses her palm against the mirror; to his horror Rolo’s right arm does the same, like a puppet’s limb jerked upwards. Their palms meet like two grotesque insects conjoining in a kiss, a pair of pale sickly moths pressed together. You are me. My right is your left, see? My birthday’s on October 25th, too.
Nunnally’s skin is cold, cold as glass. Rolo doesn’t remember reaching out, but his fingertips leave smudges.
I’m not you, he tries to say.
You are me, she insists. We’re the same coin. I am the girl and you are the boy. If I cry, you laugh. I feel so cold, and you are burning up. I am the one he loves, and you are the one he—
Shut up. His fist tightens around the shell of cool, fragile plastic, threatening to buckle. Shut up.
Nunnally vi Britannia searches for him with her gaze, innocent, confused, so terribly, terribly sad. Her eyes, like twin hollows in a porcelain face, are missing their eyeballs; worms of blood are caked along her twitching cheek. Her blood is the smear of old, archaic red clay from ruined pottery. (She is beautiful, and he is ugly.) She points towards the phone in his hand, a single heart-shaped trinket dangling from its side. I am you, Rolo. If you crack open that heart he gave you, my blood will pour out.
Rolo drops the phone. It shatters along with the mirror into tiny, tiny shards. A hurricane of sharp, vicious snowflakes breaks like the ocean’s tide as his feet, yanking the ground out from under him.
(The telephone rings, and rings, in the Lamperouge household, its lasting echo haunting the vaulted corridors and open windows. No one is home to pick up the phone.)
***
Maybe there’s a world out there where Lelouche burns down the land he stands on far before he even learns Rolo’s name. A world out there when Rolo is killed beneath needles and scalpels and V.V.’s laboratory never comes to life. There’s a world where he crushes Nunnally’s fingers beneath his heel, over and over again, and breaks open her skull to search the opaque worms of her thoughts. There’s a world where the rebellion never happens and Rolo continues killing under V.V.’s command until his brain gives in to dementia and his heart gives out.
The eye of the collective consciousness allows him to see all of these possibilities, rebounding, ever-multiplying, like a reflection trapped between two mirrors.
There’s a world out there where Lelouche never quite gets his memories back and they grow old together; they’ll drink coffee and snap at each other and when Lelouche doesn’t love him quite enough Rolo will go into the kitchen and break his knuckles on shattered wine-glasses before freezing time so that he could clean it up. It’s not as if he’s so hungry he doesn’t care that he’s licking up poison. And it’s not as if there’s a brother-shaped hole inside him that only Lelouche could fill—even if its edges wouldn’t fit right, even if onii-san is another mistaken porcelain piece.
Those worlds are not his reality.
Rolo. His brother’s hands grapple his face, his hands sticky with something that doesn’t smell like blood or antiseptic, his wrists like knobs of bone melded by sculptors; his hands are shaking with the rampant, aching vulnerability that he will never let anyone see. Rolo, listen to me. You are raving. Don’t leave me.
***
What time is it?
(Time does not exist in the World of C. Time is the river that rinses your blood from the past.)
***
The light pours into his mind, probing, like the beam of a lighthouse searching for driftwood or sunken boats. Sooner or later, it fills everything. His mind: the inside of an eggshell.
He wants—
This, they tell him. And this, and this, and this.
The fever throbs as it fades. This is a far kinder infection. Those with Geass will claim their own, devouring them, mind, memory and all. His mind will hollow like theirs; he will become a fruit devoured inside out by bugs, leaving only the husk of its pit behind. It would be a belonging like any and unlike anything he would’ve ever imagined. Eternity loosens around his neck like a scarf pulled off by the wind, leading him by the nose towards where the sand meets water. It is not a command, this time, but a disfigured wish—an almost shamefully gentle beckoning of the senses like the lukewarm ocean’s foam lapping his ankles. Time is quicksand for him to drown in.
There’s something stuck in his throat.
Lelouche presses his thumb, briefly, on the ebbing warmth of his forehead. (The brand of Cain.)
His touch is cold as ice. As absolution. Rolo remembers the first time he saw snow—like the sky was being ripped into great, big patches, breathless, so beautiful that he forgot that time was still moving forwards.
(Why is the snow so crisp, so white? Because it forgot what color it used be.)
It is five twenty, AM. You are my little brother. You are Rolo Lamperouge, you have fifteen years of an assassin track record and a river of time at your feet, and you are everything you’ve ever wanted to be.